


The Case of the Missing Golden Retriever

by LeCadavre_1904



Category: Batman - All Media Types, DCU, Green Lantern - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Past Child Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-28
Updated: 2021-02-28
Packaged: 2021-03-12 14:00:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,575
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29760705
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LeCadavre_1904/pseuds/LeCadavre_1904
Summary: Bruce isn't just the world's greatest detective, he's the world's most annoying detective. And Hal's got a problem with Bruce poking around in his life.
Relationships: Hal Jordan/Bruce Wayne
Comments: 10
Kudos: 95





	The Case of the Missing Golden Retriever

**Author's Note:**

> First of all, thank you to everyone who chooses to read this work.
> 
> I want to add a disclaimer that I'm not a Green Lantern/Hal Jordan expert - I invented his entire backstory here and it has no basis in any canon that I know of. Most of Hal's personality comes from reading oodles of fanfic, so proceed at your own risk, because he may be OOC.
> 
> I also want to give a shoutout to my inspiration, FabulaRasa. I have been binge-reading everything they've ever written because I am a huge sucker for angst and I love the way they write Bruce, Hal, and Clark. You'll probably see their influence in this work. Without their talent and writing, this wouldn't exist, so a big thank you to them for their wonderful stories.
> 
> If you have thoughts about this work or want to yell at me about Hal being OOC, please leave a comment - I'd love to hear from you!

Nobody should ever have noticed.

It’s the kind of thing people don’t think about. Because, see, it’s not like there’s hidden depths to Hal Jordan. Hal is shallow, and he doesn’t pretend to be anything else. People see that about him and they don’t probe and that’s the point.

There was just the one miscalculation, but that was all it took.

His fatal mistake began one night while he and Bruce were fixing the Javelin’s flight panel. Oliver and Barry were behind them, chattering away to “keep them company” while conveniently sitting around on their lazy asses. Figures.

And then Barry asked, “Hey, Hal, what kind of dog did you say you had growing up?” And Hal answered, “A golden retriever named Buddy,” and the conversation moved on. Hal didn’t even know what they were talking about, and moments later, the entire interaction was out of his mind.

It was the last thing on his mind four months later after a League meeting, when Dinah and Ollie were showing everyone pictures of their new puppy, a tiny floppy-eared little mutt named Oreo, to everyone’s delight. And when someone—Clark, maybe—asked him about his childhood pets, Hal said, “Oh, yeah, we had a yellow lab growing up named Buddy.”

Such a simple mistake. The kind of thing nobody notices. Certainly, Barry and Oliver didn’t notice. Hell, Hal didn’t even notice, didn’t realize that he’d said anything wrong.

Hal’s miscalculation was that there was one other person in the room he should’ve been aware of. One person who has never not noticed something in his entire goddamn life, and never, ever learned to let sleeping—or dead—dogs lie.

And that person is Bruce Goddamn Wayne.

It’s a few nights after the fateful League meeting when a knock comes at Hal’s door. He stays where he is on the couch for a moment, some football game he doesn’t actually care about playing while he’s letting his mind wander. He tries to guess who it could be. Maybe Barry or Oliver come to pay him a visit. Probably a door-to-door salesman or someone peddling their religious beliefs. _Do you have a moment to talk about our lord and savior so and so?_ Hal snorts as he gets to his feet, trudges to the door, wondering how quick he can get whoever it is to leave.

But then he opens the door and it’s none of those people. Instead, Bruce Wayne is standing there in all his impeccable… Bruce-ness. He’s dressed to the nines, in a suit that looks so expensive that Hal kinda wants to rip it off him out of spite, looking grave, his face hard as granite.

Already, Hal can tell they’re about to have a conversation he’s not going to enjoy. The question is: what conversation? And why the hell would Bruce come all the way to his apartment in Coast City to have it?

Hal doesn’t have time to come up with an answer to that question, because the moment he opens the door and registers who’s standing there, Bruce is pushing his way inside and shoving the door shut behind him.

“Yeah, okay, just… come on in, make yourself right at home, there.”

Bruce walks to his kitchen table and tosses down a file.

Hal stares down at it, knowing he shouldn’t ask but he’s going to anyway, goddamn it. “What is that?”

“A question.”

Hal quirks an eyebrow. “Is there any reason you are giving me a whole file to read as the question instead of just asking it yourself?”

Bruce considers him. “If you’d prefer I ask, then I will: why did you lie?”

And Hal is momentarily extraordinarily exasperated because he hasn’t lied to Bruce, not about anything he can recall. And anyway, why the hell would he bother lying to Bruce? Bruce already doesn’t respect him, thinks he’s an annoying shit, it’s not like lying is gonna somehow make him look more impressive in Bruce’s eyes. So, what the fuck?

“I haven’t lied about anything.”

“Is that so.”

“Sorry, are you planning to get to the point sometime this century? I actually have things to do.”

“No, you don’t,” says Bruce, and Hal really wants to snark back at him, but damn it, he’s right, Hal really _doesn’t_ have anything better to do tonight, and isn’t that just pathetic?

Then Bruce reaches down to open the file and Hal’s heart starts a triphammer beat.

It’s funny—in stories, the main character’s heart always stops when they see something horrible. It’s never been that way for Hal. His heart speeds up, adrenaline pumps through his system, telling him to _get away, get away, get away._ His body learned what to do from a young age when faced with danger.

Emily Jordan looks up at him from the page. He hasn’t seen her, not even a picture of her, since… since. The girl on the page looks young, her eyes sunken, her cheeks sallow. She looks like a gust of wind could blow her over. Weak. Non-threatening. But that’s not what Hal sees. His brain takes that picture and turns her, instead, into what she really was.

_Monster,_ whispers a small voice in his brain, and he shoves it down viciously.

Hal opens his mouth to speak, but finds that he can’t. His throat is so dry, it might as well be sandpaper—he can’t push a single word past it.

“There was no dog.”

Bruce is talking, and Hal is listening, he is, but he also isn’t taking his eyes off Emily Jordan. He won’t risk it.

“There’s no house with a white picket fence, either. No track team, no scholarship. The entire life that you’ve shared with Barry, Oliver, with the rest of the team. None of it is real.”

_It is real,_ Hal wants to say. But when he finally finds his voice, what comes out is actually: “What did you do?”

Bruce is watching him, Hal can feel it. Still, he doesn’t look at him. Might never be able to look at Bruce again, actually. “I did some digging.”

“How did you…?”

“Your dog, Buddy. First, you said he was a golden retriever. Then you said he was a yellow lab. I was curious.”

“Jesus.” Hal’s lips are numb, his body is curiously light. “You were curious. About something so… what if it had just been a mistake? Maybe I just misspoke.”

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Bruce shrug. “Then I wouldn’t have found anything. But I did.”

Because of course he did. Because what else does Bruce Wayne do, aside from digging up graves that are best left undisturbed? He missed his calling as a grave robber. Or maybe an archeologist. “Who have you told,” Hal asks and prepares for the worst.

There’s a pause, enough time for Hal to imagine all the names that could fill it, all the names he doesn’t want to hear. “Nobody,” says Bruce.

Hal squashes down the spark of hope that threatens to burn his life to the ground. He forces his hand to stay steady as he reaches out and closes the file. He doesn’t touch it a second longer than he needs to. “You don’t say anything to anyone, do you hear me?”

“It was never my intention to tell anyone.” Now, Hal is free to look at Bruce again and he sees the deep furrow between Bruce’s eyebrows, the way his brows are drawn low like thunderclouds. He realizes that Bruce isn’t actually angry—he’s not accusing Hal of anything. What he is, is confused. Also, he’s talking again. “Do you think they’d look at you differently, if they knew?”

Hal feels a million things well up in him in response to that question. So many things he wants to say to Bruce. Like, “it’s none of your business” and “get the fuck out of my apartment” and “if you ever tell anyone, I will rip your guts out your asshole and feed them to you through a tube.”

What he actually says is this: “It’s not about other people.”

Bruce tilts his head to the side. “Then what is it about?”

There’s something curious in Hal’s chest. It’s a sort of coldness, set deep where his heart should be. It’s familiar, is the thing. A familiar, terrible thing that he buried deep inside him where nobody else could see it, where it couldn’t overwhelm him—hurt him—anymore. And just like that, it was back and it was eating him alive while Bruce just fucking watched.

“You know what it’s about. You read the file.”

Bruce hesitates, looks like he’s choosing his words carefully for once in his life. _Oh,_ now’s _the time you decide to grow some tact,_ Hal thinks bitterly. “I know what happened in your childhood.”

“Yeah, I bet you do,” says Hal, and he can’t stop. He can feel the tension in his jaw, like someone injected poison into him, and the poison loosened his lips and he can’t stop fucking talking. “I bet you know all about Emily, about what she did.” He leaves out the _to me_ that should come at the end of the sentence. Thinks back to the bruises, the split lips, the broken arm that never healed right. “And then the foster homes after she… when she was out of the picture. Bet those are in that file too, huh?”

Bruce doesn’t react, and God but that makes Hal angrier. He can just stand there, calm and collected as you please, while ripping Hal’s life apart, the life ( _lie_ whispers that treacherous fucking voice) that Hal worked so hard to build. “Did you see them? The photos? I was the one who found her. She did it in the kitchen, opened up her wrists with a fucking box cutter. And you know, I didn’t even care. I was glad she was dead. I _am_ glad she’s dead.”

And he’s squeezing his eyes shut, because he can remember her—not dead on the kitchen floor. He sees her instead towering over him, her face a snarling mask of hate, reaching out to grab him by the hair.

_She’s dead, she can’t hurt me, she’s dead, she can’t hurt me,_ he repeats to himself. The way he still has to sometimes, after a particularly bad nightmare.

He’s so far in his own head, his own memories, that he doesn’t notice Bruce is next to him, sliding a hand up his arm, squeezing him, grounding him. “Hal,” says Bruce, “breathe.”

And Hal sucks in a breath he desperately needs. Bruce is steering him to sit at the table, where the file sits, a poisonous, treacherous thing. Normally, Hal doesn’t like to be manhandled. Doesn’t actually like to be touched at all, if he’s honest, and that goes double for a touch he isn’t expecting. But he follows Bruce’s lead, just this once, and sits as he’s directed.

A moment later, there’s a glass of water in front of him. He doesn’t know what else to do, so he drinks it.

Bruce is sitting across from him at the table. He looks… Hal isn’t sure how he looks, can’t quite place the expression. “I apologize,” says Bruce, and there it is—that’s guilt on his face. “I didn’t intend to cause you pain.”

It’s a strange thing to say, that showing him a picture and asking him about a nonexistent dog would be hurtful. Hal wants to tell him that it’s okay, he didn’t hurt him, he’s being ridiculous, but he doesn’t have the energy to lie. Not anymore. Not today.

He doesn’t plan on saying it. He isn’t thinking about it when he opens his mouth. Somehow, it comes out anyway, the one thing he’s never told anyone. It’s surreal that he should somehow be saying this to Bruce Wayne—to _Batman_ —at his dingy kitchen table.

“It was just… I had to pretend. Because life was so shit. Because everything around me was constantly… it was this never-ending mess of…” Hal fumbles for his words, but finds something that works, eventually, “This never-ending cycle of a fucked-up nightmare. And I hated it. I hated it so much, so I just needed something to not hate, for a little bit. It was things I wanted, things other kids had. The dog and the nice house with the backyard. A family that didn’t actually hate me.”

He remembers the first time he did it, when Emily locked him in his bedroom closet. She kept him in there the entire night, and no matter how much he cried and beat on the door she wouldn’t let him out. That was only the beginning.

“And then, even once she was dead, I just kept doing it. I stopped thinking about her, about every awful thing that had happened, and I just let myself… I let it be real. I know what you think, that it was just a lie. It was. But it was also real. The only real thing I had, for a little while.”

He’s not making any sense. He knows he isn’t making sense but he can’t think of another way to explain it.

He’s not sure what Bruce is going to do next. He might accuse Hal of lying some more, or say something stupid like “I understand” when Bruce couldn’t _possibly_ understand, or maybe he’ll just get up and leave. He’s not sure what would piss him off more. There’s no way this ends well.

But then, Bruce reaches out and holds Hal’s hand tight in his.

“I’m sorry,” he says, his eyes grave. “No child… no _person_ should ever have to go through the things you did.”

Hal is stunned into silence at that, at Bruce’s quiet eyes, their joined hands. All the things he might have expected from Bruce—and secretly, very secretly, he might have expected Bruce to think he was weak, to think he was… crazy—aren’t coming. Bruce doesn’t understand, can’t understand, but the amazing thing is, he isn’t trying to. He’s just accepting what Hal tells him, and being there for a moment, while Hal processes everything.

Eventually, the hummingbird beat of Hal’s heart slows and he starts to feel a little more human, settling back into his skin instead of trying to crawl out of it. It’s not much, but it’s something.

Bruce must notice, because that’s when he lets go of Hal’s hand. Hal is momentarily seized with the need to snatch it back, to hold it for just a while longer, but he manages to restrain himself.

Bruce stands, and Hal knows he means to go. “Nobody will ever know. It was never my intention to tell anyone else.” Hal stands and follows him to the door. He thinks that’s all Bruce is going to say, that he is going to walk out that door and into the night and that’ll be the end of this horrible, weird conversation that should’ve never happened in the first place.

But Bruce pauses. “I just want you to know…” He looks back at Hal. He’s trying to find words, Hal knows, and watching Bruce Wayne struggle with words is usually a delight, but it’s not quite, this time. Hal is anxious, he realizes, because he’s desperate to know what Bruce is going to say.

Eventually, Bruce decides something. His face settles and he says, “If you ever need anything. Even to just… talk. Or not talk. Whatever it is, I just want you to know that you can always come to me.”

With that said, Bruce opens the door and is gone as suddenly as he came.

And Hal is alone again.

Baffled, still a little shaken up, he sits at his kitchen table, where that file still waits for him. _That’s the most he’s ever said to me at one time,_ thinks Hal as he sits there and wonders.

Now his adrenaline is fading, and he’s starting to feel baseline okay again (though his nightmares tonight are going to be _ridiculous,_ thanks a lot, Bruce), he realizes he’s got to do something with the folder. Even as he thinks that to himself, something is nagging at the back of his brain, but he ignores it, for now.

“Why couldn’t you have taken it with you,” sighs Hal, looking at the file. He wonders where he keeps his shredder, before remembering he’s a sucky adult who doesn’t own things like paper shredders. Maybe he can just make one with his ring.

And then he stops for a moment and thinks.

Why did Bruce leave the file?

_Because he’s probably got a million copies, it’s not like he needs this one anyway,_ comes the bitter, sulking part of his brain.

But, no, that isn’t it. Hal can’t explain why—maybe it’s just because he’s known Bruce for literal years at this point, but something tells him there’s another reason.

And then it dawns on him.

Bruce left it because there _isn’t_ another copy.

Because the story this file tells, the reality of Hal’s shitty fucked up life, belongs to Hal alone. He has the only collection of evidence in existence, to destroy as he sees fit.

Because this is what Bruce does—he never says anything outright, never has actual, entire conversations with people. With Bruce, everything is a symbol, everything is obfuscated. There’s always something lurking under the surface of his interactions, and if you’re not careful, it’ll take a bite out of you.

And now Hal’s mind is racing, putting together puzzle pieces. That’s something most people don’t know about Hal Jordan—he’s very good with puzzles.

Everyone lies to Bruce. Constantly. In Bruce’s life, the glitzy socialite circles, lying is a universally accepted part of life. And people in the League lie, too, maybe not about missions or their job, but other things, certainly. Bruce never acknowledges any of these lies, never particularly seems to care even though he must notice them.

But he cared about Hal’s lie. He noticed Hal’s lie. He felt compelled to uncover the truth about Hal’s lie.

And when he discovered the truth, well. It would’ve been perfectly easy to ignore it. Probably preferable, because Bruce isn’t exactly a fan of heart-to-heart conversations, doesn’t like to mix his personal life with the League and in turn, doesn’t like when Leaguers try to mix him up in their personal lives.

Instead, Bruce came all the way down to Coast City to have a conversation that was almost guaranteed to make him _and_ Hal uncomfortable. For no discernible purpose, either, because he wasn’t even doing anything with the information.

And then, at the end there—Bruce was going to say something. He had something in mind, stopped, and didn’t say it.

Hal thinks about that.

And then he picks up his cell phone.

Bruce answers on the first ring. “What?” He growls, and normally that would piss Hal right off, but this time, he thinks it’s less Bruce being rude and more Bruce being completely socially inept.

“Nice to hear from you too, Spooky,” he says as he wanders back over to his living room, his idle pacing betraying his nerves, though he makes sure his voice doesn’t. “I was just wondering, is that offer still open?”

Bruce hesitates for a split second, not because he’s regretting the offer, Hal knows, but because he can’t believe Hal is taking him up on it. Hal wouldn’t believe it either, were their situations reversed. “Of course,” he says once he recovers.

“Great. Because I was thinking maybe you could come back and stick around for a little while. And since you’re going to be here, maybe I could order us something for dinner.”

Bruce is quiet, but Hal has never been daunted by silence, so he forges on. “And I was thinking, after we’re done talking about my traumatic childhood—thank you, for bringing that all back up, by the way—we could do other things.”

Bruce is still quiet, and Hal lets it lie for a while. Because Bruce has to be the one to speak next, otherwise Hal will embarrass himself. (More than he probably already has.)

“Is this… are you…” Bruce is fumbling for words again. It’s kind of cute. Maybe. A little.

“If I’m wrong, about what you were considering saying to me before you left, then we can just pretend this phone call never happened. Am I wrong?”

For one terrible, humiliating moment, Hal thinks that he was. He got the look on Bruce’s face all wrong, as he was leaving. That the words Bruce meant to say were something else entirely, and he’s just bet their entire professional relationship on the absolute wrong moment.

“You are not wrong,” says Bruce, and Hal smiles, a real ear-splitting grin, because his crazy bet played off.

“I’ll see you back here in a few minutes, then,” says Hal, and he ends the call.

Hal’s instinct is good, sharply honed. It took him a while to parse all the aspects of the look in Bruce’s eyes when he hesitated at the door. Eventually, he was able to see it all: anxiety, longing, affection, hesitation.

_You like me,_ he didn’t say to Bruce over the phone. Then again, he didn’t have to. Bruce knew he knew, and Bruce was coming back.

This time, when the knock came at his apartment door, Hal smiled.


End file.
